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Good Newsletter February 20, 2024
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Same Crime, Different Time: Sentencing Disparities in the Deep South & A Path Forward Under the Fourteenth Amendment
Get PDFThe United States has the highest incarceration rate of any country in the world. The American obsession with crime and punishment can be tracked over the last half-century, as the nation’s incarceration rate has risen astronomically. Since 1970, the number of incarcerated people in the United States has increased more than sevenfold to over 2.3 million, outpacing both crime and population growth considerably. While the rise itself is undoubtedly bleak, a more troubling truth lies just below the surface. Not all states contribute equally to American mass incarceration. Rather, states have vastly different incarceration rates. Unlike at the federal level, where courts are bound by uniform sentencing guidelines, state courts have no such mandatory measures in place; this allows for states to implement sentencing systems and criminal codes that are entirely independent of other states’ procedures nationwide. Data published on states’ laws concerning criminal punishment shows that legislatures have adopted widely varying statutory approaches to both defining and determining criminal sentencing.
This Note first explores the Deep South’s contribution to mass incarceration in the United States, specifically, the national average. To accomplish this end, this Note provides an in-depth analysis of state prison incarceration data collected, synthesized, and analyzed by this Note’s author. Next, this Note discusses how the variation in criminal sentencing between states contributes to “geographical discrimination” and how such discrimination threatens individuals’ rights to equal protection under the Fourteenth Amendment. This Note then provides a modern take on possible solutions provided by the Fourteenth Amendment whereby individuals may challenge disparate sentencing in the Deep South on the basis that such disparities are a form of geographic discrimination that fails the Rational Basis Test
A Blueprint to Reclaim Legal Education from External Rankers
Get PDFThe U.S. News & World Report (U.S. News) law school rankings have impacted the perceptions and behaviors of everyone in the rankings ecosystem for decades. Commentators have almost universally condemned these ordinal rankings, yet they continue to influence the legal education market, often in highly detrimental ways.
The influence of these rankings stems from legitimate market demands, for reasons that the psychology of choice literature makes clear. People want (or need) to efficiently acquire and digest information that could help them make consequential decisions. At a time when consumers of law school information did not have such choice-making assistance, U.S. News filled the void. Whether purportedly relevant information comes from U.S. News, different rankers of law schools, or other sources of information, the fundamental problem is that these sources are filling a void that exists because of law schools’ inaction. The law school community is the only cohort of entities that can create data about certain relevant considerations that are currently missing, and they are best positioned to both refine the data categories that currently exist and communicate the potential significance of the generated data. Without a more comprehensive product, law school data consumers will continue to rely on incomplete and potentially misleading information, arbitrarily reduced to a single composite score and ordinal rank by commercial enterprises like U.S. News.
This Article provides a blueprint for how the law school community can create an alternative product and reclaim legal education. Such a product would add considerable value to all law school data consumers, including prospective students, law professors, law school administrators, and legal employers. This is laudable in its own right, but such a product would also diminish the influence of rankers like U.S. News because its value would make the deficiencies of the current rankings too obvious for the market to ignore
The Consumer’s Choice to Boycott
Get PDFIn the wake of employees losing their jobs upon voicing their political opinions concerning Israel, Harvard and Columbia law students’ job offers being rescinded upon expressing support for Palestine, and the names and social media profiles of individuals who support Palestine being collected and listed on Canary Mission, such backlash may leave many Americans wondering what form of resistance to settler-colonialist apartheid is acceptable in the twenty-first century. Recently, the movement to collectively boycott brands like Starbucks, which sued its Worker’s Union for a tweet expressing support for Palestine; Disney, which donated money to Israel; and McDonald’s, where a location gave away free Happy Meals to IDF soldiers, have gained momentum on social media websites like TikTok and Instagram. Perhaps this trend garnered attention because it allows Americans who feel disheartened by what their tax dollars pay for in the Middle East to refuse to continue putting dollars in the pockets of corporations that either directly or indirectly support Israel.
However, boycotting Israel in the United States did not begin recently. Rather, the official Palestinian Boycott, Divest, Sanctions Movement (BDS) was formulated in 2005. The ability to boycott and resist oppression in a nonviolent manner is not available to everyone. As of October 2023, thirty-eight states have enacted anti-boycott legislation that restricts an individual’s ability to boycott Israel when they are a contractor acting in a contractual capacity.
This Note addresses how the BDS Movement has unfolded in the United States and has sparked litigation surrounding the issue of protected speech under the First Amendment. Part I provides an overview of the formation and purpose of the BDS Movement. Part II examines common anti-BDS statutory schemes. Part III discusses the reasoning in prominent First Amendment lawsuits challenging anti-BDS statutes. Finally, Part IV argues that it is important for the United States Supreme Court to review Arkansas Times v. Waldrip because it leaves open a pathway for policymakers to both restrict ordinary Americans’ ability to participate in some boycotts but not others and to restrict business owner’s practices and choices
Fleeing Terror in Southern Mexico: Why Numerous Guerrero Refugees Qualify for Asylum
Get PDFThis report sheds light on the crisis confronting residents of Guerrero, a state in Southern Mexico plagued by rampant, indiscriminate violence and human rights violations. It utilizes research and first-person interviews to methodically provide a rationale for granting these refugees asylum under U.S. law
Alliance Politics in Corporate Debt Restructurings
No full textAlliance politics have always been a complicating factor in corporate restructurings. Negotiations between and among large groups of corporate stakeholders naturally require that parties expend time and resources on building coalitions, overcoming holdouts, and fleshing out their collective action. But recent trends suggest that alliance politics—rather than sound financial and economic decisions—may be driving restructuring outcomes, introducing new risks and inefficiencies in the financial markets. For instance, restructuring proponents increasingly use wedge strategies and divide-and-conquer tactics to exacerbate the coordination problems that lenders in large syndicates already face, giving rise to hostile restructurings that have the potential to introduce dangerous ripple effects in the capital markets. These strategies succeed because they introduce new opportunities for lender defection from the syndicate, essentially recasting the high-stakes coordination game played by lenders and driving up strategic uncertainty. By design, these transactions siphon value away from senior creditors, ultimately causing capital market participants to behave in inefficient ways. They may also enable economically wasteful restructurings by overpowering senior lender groups that would have collectively (and rightfully) pushed a company to liquidate. These developments call for a renewed focus on the role of alliance politics in corporate debt restructuring. This Article contributes to these efforts, laying the conceptual groundwork for subsequent works that explore other dimensions of the complicated, high-stakes relationships that make up the modern firm’s capital structure